1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a corneal endothelial cell photographing apparatus for photographing a cell image of the corneal endothelium of an examinee's eye.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, there is known an apparatus arranged to obtain a cell image of corneal endothelium in a noncontact manner by irradiating illumination light from an illumination light source to a cornea from an oblique direction and receives reflection light from the cornea by an imaging element (see Patent Document 1).
Meanwhile, as the above apparatus, there are known for example an apparatus provided with a focus detection sensor for detecting a focused state with respect to corneal endothelium and arranged to perform photographing after moving a main unit to an in-focus position with respect to the corneal endothelium (see Patent Document 1) and an apparatus arranged to perform serial photographing while moving a main unit in a predetermined direction (see Patent Document 2).
In the case of the conventional apparatuses, however, it takes long to obtain many endothelial images, resulting in a burden on an examiner and an examinee. For instance, to obtain endothelial images of many sites by changing fixation positions, an examinee needs to change his/her visual line every time the fixation position is changed, and such a photographing operation is repeated.
As represented by photographing to many sites, lengthening of an examination time causes fatigue of eyes. Such eye fatigue increases involuntary eye movement. This results in deterioration of photographed images.